Studium Christi
It happened already in the seminary, with some of the students who sat near me in our large classes (we were very numerous). So a small group began to take form—because the same law is always at work: a few grow closer, feel an affinity with your vision, with your heart, with your life. And so the first true core of the Movement, which we called Studium Christi at the time, was born. Each month—later every two weeks—we put together a kind of mimeographed sheet entitled Christus, in which each of us wrote about his personal experience of the relationship between Christ’s presence and something that interested him: studies, current events, other things. But another group of fellow students made fun of our efforts; they began to hold meetings and took the name Studium Diaboli. With freedom, anything is possible. Then, a year and a half later, the rector of the seminary, who later became the cardinal of Milan, asked to see me. “What you are doing is a wonderful thing,” he said. “But it is dividing the class and you cannot do it any more.” When he later became bishop of Milan, he still used to tell the story, exaggerating poetically as he was inclined to do, that one winter evening while we seminarians were entering the refectory en masse and he was walking behind us without our being aware that he was there, he heard me say to another seminarian: “The rector has killed our ‘Christ’.” To tell the truth, I do not recall having said it.
In any case, these are things one cannot stop. The seed which I have described gave life to our friendship throughout our years in the seminary. It determined our choice of authors to read and which authors became our favorites (reading, for example, in high school Möhler, Solov’ev, Newman, understanding what we could). In this way we made our study of theology come alive. It certainly did not remain fossilized doctrine for us.

“He came unto His own and His own received him not”
After about a decade of various experiences, while I was teaching at the same theological seminary, I met a group of students on the train to Rimini. I began to talk about Christianity with them. I found them so unaware of the most elementary things, and so indifferent to them, that I felt an uncontrollable desire to share my experience with them. I wanted them to have, as I had had, the experience of the “beautiful day.” After that meeting I left my position at the seminary, in agreement with the rector (I was, in fact, spending more time with young people than preparing my lectures), and began to teach religion in Italy’s secondary schools.
I still remember perfectly the day, so important for my life. While I was walking up the four steps to the school’s entrance for the first time, I was saying to myself: “I am coming here to give to these young people what was given to me.” I repeat this all the time, because that was the only reason we have done what we have done (and will continue to do it as long as God allows us to). The only reason for our every move is that they should know Him, that men should know Christ. God became man, and came unto His own; that His own people should not know Him is the worst sin, is the
greatest injustice, beyond compare.

Christ the center of the cosmos and of history
“Christ the center of the cosmos and of history.” When I heard John Paul II use this phrase in his first address (literally the same phrase—and my friends of the time can bear witness to the fact—had been from the beginning the one we used regularly for meditation), I felt an emotion that brought back all the memories of the discussions I had held with young people at school and which they had held between themselves, and the profound tension with which we gathered together in the name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. I always used to say the young people: “Come and see,” or “You will see greater things than this,” as Jesus says in the Gospels. Or, as the prayer during Mass says, “May your Church be made manifest to the world,” or “God, Glory of His people.” And then I would ask: “But what is the meaning of ‘God, Glory of His people,’ if not the change that Christ produces in the individual and in society through the mystery of His permanence in the Church?” This change is the miracle which gives Him glory.
This is what we have been asking of God for so many years, only this: that Christ help us to live the Church in such a way that, also through our lives, our action, our companionship, our projects, He may appear ever more in the world to the men and women chosen by the mystery of the Father,
that the glory of God may thus appear ever more clearly, through our adherence to Christ that changes our lives, and the life of the world, by transfiguring them. This is the sole reason we came together and will continue to come together, for as long as God wills.
When I first began to teach religion, I would ask the students I passed on the steps: “Do you think Christianity is present here in the school?” Almost all would look at me surprised and laugh, and some would say, “No way!” So I’d then say: “In that case, either faith in Christ isn’t true, or a new way of believing is needed.” This is how our discussions began, starting from the premise that Christ was the center of the cosmos and of history, the keystone of knowledge of man and the world, the source of a possible peace for the individual heart and for society, the source of an unknown and unique surge of affection, like the emotion Socrates describes when he suddenly interrupts his talk and says (to Plato, Xenophon, and his other listeners): “Is it perhaps not true, my friends, that when we speak of truth we even forget about women?”
Young people slowly became attracted to the debates we were holding, showing their curiosity, anger and affection. These became the most talked about subject in the school during the 12 years I served there as a religion teacher. Christ and the Church was the daily topic and the subject of ferocious debate.
I used to ask the young people (and still ask the question now): “What alternative do we have? The alternative of politics? On this point, Camus again has something to say in his Notebooks, written in 1953. Speaking about the political left (at that time the symbol of the redemptive honesty of political energy) Camus said: “What the left approves of is done without a word being said, or else it is judged inevitable. This includes: 1) the deportation of thousands of Greek children; 2) the physical destruction of the Russian peasant class; 3) the millions in concentration camps; 4) imprisonment for political reasons; 5) daily political executions; 6) anti-Semitism; 7) stupidity;
8) cruelty. The list could go on.” But this list is sufficient for me. I do not mean to be pessimistic, but it is difficult not to view contemporary politics within this framework.
Then I would ask the students: “Is there another area of hope, more serious than politics, more able to succeed? Is it science?” Thirty years ago, “science” was a word a hundred times more “divine” than it is today. We had to wait many years later to hear John Paul II say: “The science of totality
(because it is not science if it does not claim to deal with the total horizon) leads spontaneously to the question of totality itself; a question that does not find its answer within such a totality.” Passion for the whole horizon leads inevitably to the question about the meaning of the horizon, but within it no answer can be found.
The development of our interest in life in all of its aspects had, and continues to have, His presence as its reference point: “We believe in Christ who died and rose again, Christ present here and now.” This interest has led us to become involved in politics in its overall meaning, in perfect awareness that it is not from politics that our salvation comes; and this made us regain enthusiasm all over again for studies and science, not out of a kind of idolatry or in order to advance professionally, but for a seriousness that could dig a deeper and deeper channel for knowledge, which ultimately has its center in Christ. Our experience of His presence has generated a passion for social and political life and a passion for knowledge (our movement’s “Meeting” in Rimini, Italy, even if only tentatively, but with determination and passion, was born from this dual interest, that is, from the root that created this dual interest).
St Augustine in his Contra Iulianum wrote: “This is the horrible root of your error: you claim that the gift of Christ consists in his example, while that gift is His person itself.” Everyone speaks reverently about Christ’s example, about moral values, even those who write in the Voce Repubblicana; indeed, they teach and preach to Christians that they must follow moral values for the good of the State. But the gift of Christ is His presence; this is the new thing in the world and there will never be anything newer than this.
In one of his poems, Milosz writes: “I am only a man, therefore I need perceivable signs; constructing ladders of abstractions tires me quickly. Grant oh God, therefore, a man in any place whatsoever on earth and permit me to admire You by looking upon him.” Christ is the answer to this supreme human prayer. Christ’s incarnation meets the needs of man’s nature. It corresponds in an unimaginable way to a sensible need, to the living and passionate need of a man.

“We are one”
In his inaugural sermon, the new archbishop of Cologne, Cardinal Meisner, poses a question which I would like to turn to now: “The eternal word of the Father was made flesh. And now, in the Church, He can be heard and touched by all men.” But what is the Church made of? Of you, of me. This was the immediate and spontaneous discovery I made that month of October when I began to teach religion.
If God has become man and is here and communicates Himself to us, you and I are one and the same thing. Between you and me, strangers, the strangeness has been lifted, or as St Paul called it, the enmity; we are now friends. In contrast, I would say to the students: “You have been together in the same classes for five years, sitting in desks next to one another. You have connived for years, but you are not really friends. You go on vacations together, you study together, you have fun together but you are not friends. You are temporary companions; there is nothing between you that is enduring. None of you is in relationship with or feels interested in the other’s destiny.”
I said this to make the point that Christ is present precisely through and in our unity, that unity into which we are placed by the act by which He seizes us, the sacrament of Baptism. By seizing us in Baptism, Christ places us together as members of the same body (cf. chapters 1 to 4 of the Letter to the Ephesians). He is present here and now, in me, through me, and the first expression of the change which is a sign of His presence is that I recognize that I am united to you, and that we are one and the same thing.
As St Paul writes in the Letter to the Galatians, chapter 3 (another passage I would always quote): “For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you all are one in Christ Jesus.” Whatever utopia man may have created, he has never even dreamed of the unity which Christ has created in us. If we acknowledge Him, He acts, and our life becomes more human.
Christ makes our life more human. Thus the other Gospel phrase with which I used to challenge the students when I entered the school—a phrase I used every hour I taught—was: “He who follows me will have eternal life and a hundredfold here below.” “‘He who follows me will have eternal
life,’ may perhaps not interest you,” I used to say, “but the second phrase cannot help interesting you: you will have a hundredfold here below.’ This means you will live a hundred times better your love for your girl or boyfriend, your father and mother, you will have a hundred times more passion for study, love of work, enjoyment of nature.”
The need expressed by Milosz in his poem is precisely this: to encounter someone—visible and tangible—following whom we can experience the hundredfold: “Raise up therefore a man in some place on this earth and grant that by looking upon him I may admire You”—this is Christ for man.
But Christ is in you and in me, and that is a tremendous thing (tremendum mysterium); it is the source of our responsibility and of our humility, something we must inevitably confront because we are the physical sign of His presence.
There were fifteen of us when I used to say that our community is the real sign—even if temporary, provisional, laughable but great—by which Christ becomes the object of a present experience. From that original group of fifteen, by my last year of teaching we had become a group of some 300. But the number doesn’t matter. After 12 years there might only have been just three of us, or two (this is the meaning of marriage as a sacrament: marriage is, and ought to be, a sign for the community because one discovers in it a union not born of flesh and blood, but of Christ).
The community, infinitely dilated, is the Mystery through which I can truly say to Christ with fear and trembling and love: “You.” My discovery of this came at a certain meeting held on the [Ligurian] sea coast, at the top of a tower, in Varigotti.

The community is the place of memory
Memory is the consciousness of a presence that has begun and lasts: memory is the consciousness of Christ’s presence.
The great Italian post-World War II writer Pavese used to say: “Memory is a passion repeated.” We live a passion for Christ, a repeated passion, because unfortunately there can be no uninterrupted continuity in us.
Pavese also says: “The richness of a work [that is, of a generation or of our life as generation] is always revealed by the quantity of the past it contains.” But it must be a past that can be in the present more powerfully than as a memory, because memory fades, it is like worn out clothes. The memory of Christ is the memory of a past that becomes so present as to determine the present more than anything else that is present. Memory has become the most important word of our community: the community is the place where one lives memory.
I would like to give in detail some aspects of this reality of the community, a word that indicates a companionship that is not born of the flesh or blood but of Christ, whose life is memory. As St Catherine of Siena said: “Memory has been filled with blood.” Our memory is filled with the blood of the cross and of the glory of the resurrection, because the Cross of Christ cannot be conceived without the resurrection. Therefore, Claudel rightly said, peace, which is the heredity that Christ has left us as the sign of His active and working presence, “is made of equal parts of sorrow and joy.”

The drama of a battle
Above all the life of our community has never suppressed the sense of the drama of life; it has never forced anyone to take any particular step. It has always been a passionate proposal but one well aware of the effort which must be made by those who have heard the call. Certainly the truth bears witness to itself in its own proclamation: Christ’s message is so much in keeping with what man longs for and waits for that the individual who feels its impact cannot help having a positive response. But immediately afterwards a resistance arises. I used to say to the young people in class, “As I speak to you, you seem interested and your faces say unequivocally, ‘That’s true, that’s
the way it is.’ But afterwards, something diabolical, original sin, fills you with ‘buts,’ ‘ifs,’ ‘perhaps,’ ‘however,’ ‘who knows,’ that is, with skepticism, to make you try to escape from the evidence that has flashed before your eyes.” When this resistance arises, the drama of a struggle begins.
Every human relationship is filled with drama—no real human relationship exists that is not. This fact touches its deepest point in the relationship with Christ. And the drama does not at all consist in an hysterical exasperation, but in saying “You” with an awareness of the difference and of the journey that must be made.
“First my will [where resistance is located above all] and then my intelligence,” a Lithuanian dissident has written, “resisted for a long time, but in the end I surrendered, and I won [the winner is the one who achieves self-affirmation]. This was not a capitulation in the face of the adversary but a reconciliation with the Father [with the origin of oneself]. His possession of me is my liberation.” (In The Religious Sense, a book containing my notes from my first years at the school, I developed this idea of the identification between being possessed and being free).
After only a year from the Movement’s beginning, with the students in my first and second year high school classes, we printed an anthology of Dionysius the Areopagite, with the Greek text facing the Italian, that contained one of the most beautiful phrases I have ever read: “Who could ever speak of the love for the man who is possessed by Christ, overflowing with peace?” This is what I meant by the phrase, “His possession of me is my liberation.”

Entreaty:
man’s supreme gesture
When I saw the human drama being lived by these young people—at that time, when there were several hundred of us, we would discuss things from morning to night, even outside school hours—I understood for the first time, after all my years in seminary, what it meant to ask.
Entreaty is the supreme expression of man, and it is the most elementary one: man can ask no matter what condition he is in—even if he is atheist. Indeed, the more man feels in difficulty, the more the act of asking suits him. In Manzoni’s novel The Betrothed, the atheist—the Unnamed—says: “God, if you are there, reveal yourself to me.” Nothing could be more rational than this: ‘If you are there’ is the category of possibility, a dimension that cannot be renounced if reason is to be authentic, ‘reveal yourself to me’ is entreaty.”
We shall all be judged according to whether we asked, because even in the lion’s den or buried beneath the mire we can cry out, we can ask. During Holy Week, the Ambrosian liturgy suggests a moving form of this entreaty (the tenderness the Church can show is astonishing): “Even if I am late, do not close your door. I have come to knock. To one who seeks you weeping, open the door, merciful Lord; receive me in your dwelling, give me the bread of the Kingdom.”
I never said to the first young people who met together: “Pray.” All those who came, even if they didn’t participate in its content, took part in the gesture of prayer. After a little while everyone began to take daily communion. I used to say to them that the sacrament is the greatest prayer, the essence of prayer, because it expresses the entreaty of one’s whole self: one participates in it without even knowing how to think, how to speak, without knowing anything, asking by one’s presence: “I am here.” How can one, then, establish a hierarchy of values and contents? What must we obtain to be able to develop life? What must one ask for? Affection for Christ!
St Thomas Aquinas says: “The life of man consists in the love that principally sustains him and in which he finds his greatest satisfaction” (in the Latin meaning of “satisfaction,” which implies fulfillment, completeness). The most beautiful thing in the history of our Movement is that first hundreds, and then thousands of young people have learned, and now live, the love for Christ that alone permits one to love one’s friend, or a woman, or oneself.
But how do we get this capacity for loving Christ? First and foremost, by asking for it. The religious history of humanity, which is the Bible, ends with this phrase: “Come, Lord Jesus.” It is an “affectionate” entreaty, overflowing with “attachment.” Until a few years ago, it was the formula that we used regularly in our community. Now there is another which we focus on: Veni Sancte Spiritus. Veni per Mariam. It is the same, but more developed and aware.

An all-encompassing affection
A love that sustains life, in which man finds his fulfillment, must have as its content, its object something that can pertinere ad omnia (pertain to all things). In this regard, a well-known phrase of Guardini’s comes to mind: “In the experience of a great love everything that happens becomes an event in its ambit.” If a man and a woman love each other with a profound love, then the bloody events of Tienanmen Square, a song one hears, or the sun in front of one’s eyes, everything that happens becomes an event in its ambit.
The object of love must be capable of encompassing everything. For this reason Communion and Liberation (which was once called Student Youth) has never organized activities that were not unequivocally educational. The choice of the mountains for summer holidays, for example, is not a chance decision (we did not go to the seaside from the outset because it is too distracting). In the mountains, the healthy human surroundings and nature’s imposing beauty combine every time to help renew the question of being, of order, of the goodness of reality—reality is the first provocation which awakens the religious sense in us. With the necessary discipline, which has always been rigorously preserved (discipline is like the bed of a brook or stream: in it the water runs purer, clearer, faster; discipline is necessary because everything is recognized to have a meaning), the vacations in the mountains are proposed to people’s experience as a foretaste, even if fleeting, of the Christian promise of fulfillment, like a little anticipation of paradise, and every detail has to convey that promise and make that anticipation come true.
What our movement is usually criticized for is in fact the sign of our greatness: that everything happens within the horizon of the presence of Christ, that is, of our companionship. We are criticized for the fact that the experience of the love of Christ is all-encompassing; but everything that is divided and separated from His presence will be destroyed! Division is the beginning of destruction. This is why we have always hated the word censorship. I would say: “You cannot censor anything, not out of a psychoanalytic passion, but so that everything may be revealed, cleared up, explained and assisted.”

Gladness in the depths of sorrow
The sign of a life that goes forward in love for Christ, that is, that adheres to and participates in his companionship, is gladness. “I have told you these things so that my joy may be in you and your joy might be complete.” Christ said this a few hours before he died.
Joy alone is the mother of sacrifice, because sacrifice is not reasonable if it is not attracted by the beauty of the truth. It is beauty—“the splendor of the truth”—which calls us to sacrifice. As the Bible says in the Book of Sirach: “A happy man is also at peace when he sits down to his meal; he savors what he eats.”
This joy, this gladness lie even at the depth of the most acute sorrow, a sorrow which at a certain point cannot be avoided: sorrow at one’s own evil. To belong to our company means beginning to feel that the greatest sorrow is that of one’s own evil, of sin. No one can say: “I will never again commit a sin,” because keeping God’s law—that is, following Christ—is a miracle of Grace, not something we accomplish by ourselves. This is why the point at which the freedom of the Mystery and man’s freedom meet and embrace is entreaty.

The greatness of the instant
Another discovery has become a normal part of our history: the greatness of the instant, the importance of the moment, contingent reality, in which an endless series of solicitations by which the Mystery calls us come together (thus our greatest friends are the inevitable circumstances in which we find ourselves: they are the objective sign of the Mystery that calls us). Again in the Ambrosian liturgy there is this lovely prayer: “Grant, oh God, that the Church of Christ may celebrate ineffable Mysteries in which our smallness as mortal creatures is rendered sublime in an eternal relationship and our existence in time begins to flourish as a life without end. Thus, following Your design of love, man passes from a mortal condition to a wondrous salvation.”

The wonder of an encounter
De Lubac, in Paradoxes and New Paradoxes, observes that “the conformist [one who adopts the prevailing mentality, that is, who does not adhere to His companionship] looks at even the things of the Spirit in their formal, exterior aspect. The obedient person instead takes even the things of the earth in their interior and sublime aspects.” For this reason it is necessary to cultivate a human gift that is natural to a child and becomes something great when it exists in an adult: wonder. As someone wrote to me: “Nothing is communicated except what is received freely (as by a child).
And it is kept only because one is astonished.” We therefore need to increase our capacity for wonder: “If you are not like little children you will never enter.”
In the second part of the first chapter of John’s Gospel, there is an account of how John and Andrew set out to follow Jesus. Jesus turned around and said: “What are you looking for?” “Master, where are you staying?” “Come and see.” And they went and remained with Him the entire day. Let us try to imagine who those two men were who followed Jesus, quite scared, and the young man who walked ahead of them. Who knows with what wonder they looked at Him and listened to Him!
Another page of the Gospel strikes me in the same way. It describes the moment when Jesus passed through the crowds of people in Jericho. The head of the local mafia in Jericho, Zacchaeus, climbs a sycamore tree to see Him, because he was a small man. Jesus passes nearby and looks up to where the man had climbed, and says: “Zacchaeus, come down quickly, for today I must stay at your house” (Luke 19:5). Let’s try to imagine what that man must have felt. It is as if Christ had said to him: “I respect you, Zacchaeus, climb down quickly, I am coming to your house.” But that encounter would not be true—it would be as if it had not taken place 2,000 years ago—if it did not happen today. One cannot follow Christ if one does not perceive that He is true today! The encounters with persons who look at us and understand us as Jesus looked at and understood Zaccheus, and whom we can look at, are the most important things in our lives. “Look every day upon the faces of the saints and take comfort from their words,” is the invitation of one of the first Christian documents, the Didaché.

The company, place of belonging
The community, the company where the encounter with Christ takes place, is the place to which our ‘I’ belongs, where it attains the ultimate way of perceiving and feeling things—grasping them intellectually, judging them. Here one can imagine, plan, decide, do. Our individual ‘I’ belongs to this “body” which is what our company is, and finds in it the ultimate criterion for facing all reality. Therefore our point of view does not go its own way, but rather commits itself to a comparison and in doing so obeys the community, the company. As Rilke said to his wife, speaking of that brief but exemplary belonging that is the relationship between a man and a woman, “When something remains obscure, it is the kind of thing that does not demand clarification, but submission.” We experience great submission in our community life: submission to the Mystery of Christ who makes
Himself present among us and walks with us.
Something Péguy said captures the point well: “When the pupil does nothing but repeat, not the same resonance but a miserable copy of the thought of the master; when the pupil is nothing more than a pupil, even if he is the greatest of pupils, he will never create anything. A pupil does not begin to create until he himself introduces a new sound (that is, in the measure in which he is not a pupil). It is not that one should not have a master, but one must descend from the other by the natural ways of filiation, not by the scholastic ways of discipleship.”
This is what our community needs in order for it to become the source of mission throughout the world: not discipleship, nor repetition, but filiation. The introduction of an echo and a new resonance is natural in a son who has his father’s nature. He has the same nature, but he is something new. In fact, the son can do better than the father, and the father can watch happily as the son becomes greater than he. But what the son does is greater only in so far as it realizes more fully what the father has felt. For the living organic nature of our community, then, there is nothing more contradictory, on the one hand, than the affirmation of one’s own opinion, of one’s own measure, of one’s own way of feeling, and on the other hand, repetitiveness. It is filiation that generates, the process by which the blood of the father passes into the heart of the son—and generates a different capacity of realization. Thus the great Mystery of His presence is multiplied and spread, so that all may see Him, rendering glory to God.